Category Archives: Volume 9, no. 3 (2014)

This special issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum contains the proceedings from the first meeting of the third NSU study group called “Crisis and Crisis Scenarios: Normativity, Possibilities and Dilemmas”, held March 14-16 2014 at the Lysebu Conference Centre in Oslo, Norway, and with a research program running from 2014 to 2016 aimed at examining the concept of Crisis as it is used today in academia. In this collection of papers from the symposium we present some of the different ways in which the topic of the study group was addressed.

This paper was written for the 2014 Winter Symposium of the Nordic Summer University’s (NSU) research group number three, dealing with the concept of crisis. In it, I provide two pictures of Iceland’s notorious 2008 economic crisis and unexpected 2009-2013 recovery: one small, another big. The small one is a concise three-step account of what sort of policies preceded the economic crisis, what this crisis consisted primarily in, and what sort of policies followed it. The big one is a twofold reflection on how the Icelandic experience fits within larger global trends, which means considering the country’s experience from an economic-historical perspective and from an axiological one.

The present article analyzes the transformation of the long-term risks of protracted wars from the battlefield to the economic system. Major wars, supplied with strong capacities due to extended manpower resources, advanced logistic capabilities and permanency of campaign, expose their states to extremely costly engagements. This includes heavy long-term costs for war veterans. Accordingly, the center of gravity on the battlefield (Clausewitz) is transformed to the financial systems of taxes and credit systems. This is a classical historical lesson; but this story is indeed central to understanding the link between the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, and the background for the financial crisis that began in 2008.

In this paper I would like to show the importance of the concept of responsibility as the foundation of ethics in times of crisis in particular in the fields of politics and economics in the modern civilisation marked by globalization and technological progres. I consider the concept of responsibility as the key notion in order to understand the ethical duty in a modern technological civilisation. We can indeed observe a moralization of the concept of responsibility going beyond a strict legal definition in terms of imputability. The paper begins by discussing the humanistic foundations of such a concept of responsibility. It treats the historical origins of responsibility and it relates this concept to the concept of accountability. On the basis of this historical determination of the concept I would like to present the definition of the concept of responsibility as fundamental ethical principle that has increasing importance as the foundation of the principles of governance in modern welfare states. In this context the paper discusses the extension of the concept of responsibility towards institutional or corporate responsibility where responsibility does not only concerns the responsibility of individuals but also deals with the responsibility of institutional collectivities. In this way the paper is based on the following structure : 1) The ethical foundation of the concept of responsibility 2) Responsibility in technological civilisation 3) Political responsibility for good governance in the welfare state 4) Social responsibility of business corporations in times of globalization 5) Conclusion and discussion : changed conditions of responsibility in modern times.

Has the competition among professions in the Nordic welfare states intensified in recent decades? Yes, and in a manner that has resulted in predictable classic struggles and conflicts among professions. We argue that the struggles and conflicts that arise translate into insufficient provision of welfare services for taxpayers’ money. To avoid this predicament, further developing co-operation among professions is important. Public managers, as argued in this article using a Danish case, play a significant role in achieving this. The Danish case studied shows how some public managers, in their efforts to create co-operation among professions, have developed a modern, dialogue-based management technique built on dialectical refutation, similar to Socratic elenchus.

The three social phenomena — norms, trust, and crisis — are in this paper combined into one model that illustrates their function and relationship. Crisis is seen as a reaction to serious violations of expectations that leave people disoriented, insecure about situational norms, and unable to judge whom to trust. One logical solution to a crisis is to rebuild a shared understanding of the norms involved in any given context. Banking is used as a case. Central concepts are borrowed from Niklas Luhmann Trust (1968), Alf Ross Directives and Norms (1967), and Arthur G. Neal National Trauma & Collective Memory (1998).

A general anthropocentric view of the human species affects the environment and is a major contributing factor in the environmental crisis we are currently facing. A species egalitarian society would have positive effects on the crisis, and particularly in regards to short term goals of decreasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Additionally it would increase the quality of life and alleviate the suffering of countless beings, nonhuman animals and humans alike.

The paper discusses the relation between social entrepreneurship and capitalism. In the wake of the crisis erupting in 2008, the political attention to social entrepreneurship has intensified and social entrepreneurship and social innovation has been presented as possible solutions to a number of societal problems. By linking different theoretical trends of social entrepreneurship to Boltanski and Chiapello’s three spirits of capitalism the paper elucidates different variations of social entrepreneurship. It argues that whereas classic entrepreneurship is theoretically closely connected to capitalism and seen by innovation theory as the major driving force of economic development, social entrepreneurship is sometimes linked to non-capitalist understandings of the economy and as part of a capitalist-critical movement.

Environmental ethics began in the 1960s with a growing awareness of coming environmental problems such as pollution and the projected shortage of resources caused by an acceleration in human’s technically based exploitation of nature. In addition to becoming an issue in public debate and in politics since the 1970s, the environmental crisis, which can be laid at the door of industrialization, calls for a more basic consideration of man’s attitude to nature. In this paper I give a short presentation of the concept of crisis in a selection of the principal classical critical philosophies of history and suggest that they all connect crisis to the oppression of man’s inner nature. I go on to sketch the idea of environmental crisis as an oppression of outer nature (the natural environment) suggesting that a new, more nuanced organic concept of nature is needed as a condition for ascribing value to life on earth as a whole, which is what most non-anthropocentric ethical theories to some extent do.

On the basis of Hannah Arendt’s and Carl Schmitt’s writings on the constituent power, this article sets out to develop an interpretative framework which would aid the understanding of the legitimation crisis of European integration initiated by the EU constitutional failure of 2004. The question raised in this essay is whether the successful establishment of democratic constitutional legitimacy is conditional upon the existence of a federal state. From the perspective of the constituent power, two opposing answers are given based on two rivalling notions of the ultimate meaning of constitutional politics: freedom and security. The article concludes that even though the EU as a case remains undecided, it seems likely that democracy and constitutional politics have parted ways in the EU both in the Arendtian and in the Schmittian sense. If that is the case, the constitutional crisis is a serious problem for the future of democracy in the EU.

From their beginning in the 1930s, critical theory and the Frankfurt school had their focus on a critique of disturbed social relations in western society dominated by totalitarian political regimes like Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism, and by capitalism as an oppressive and destructive economic system and culture. Now, 80 years later, this has all become history and thus it is time to leave the concept of critical theory behind us, and instead bring the concept of critique to a broader theoretical framework like hermeneutics. This allows the possibility of retaining the theoretical intentions of the old Frankfurt school and at the same time there will be no boundaries by specific dominant theoretical perspectives. In this paper, such a framework for a critical hermeneutics is discussed on the basis of Weber’s, Gadamer’s, and Habermas’ theories on hermeneutics within the social sciences.